Raja Assad Hameed

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New York,
March 27, 2009--Pakistani
authorities must not allow Thursday's shooting death of veteran Pakistani
reporter Raja Assad Hameed in Rawalpindi go uninvestigated and unprosecuted,
the Committee to Protect Journalists said today.

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Unidentified gunmen killed Hameed, a reporter with the
English-language daily The Nation and its Urdu-language television channel,
Waqt, while he was parking his car at his house.

Media accounts of the attack varied. Beena Sarwar, a media
and human rights activist, looked closely into the murder and described what
she found to CPJ: "His family rushed out on hearing the gunshots and found
Hameed lying in a pool of blood. The bullets, fired at close range, had pierced
his neck and shoulder." Doctors pronounced the journalist dead on arrival at
Benazir Bhutto Hospital.

Hameed was well-known and held in high regard. He was fluent
in English, Urdu, and Punjabi, and frequently appeared on Al-Jazeera, analyzing
political developments in Pakistan.

The day after the attack, Information Minister
Qamar-uz-Zaman Kaira told the official Associated Press of Pakistan that
"sick-minded criminals must have committed the murder of a journalist in
Rawalpindi" and he promised "to leave no stone unturned in investigating the
heinous crime." Rawalpindi police later suspended their investigation without
resolution, news reports said.